All posts in Brown University

8:00 p.m.: You’re getting ready; you’re pumped, you deserve this. You’ve had a long week, you’ve spent countless hours in the SciLi… So what if you blackout and wake up at 2 p.m tomorrow? The memories you don’t remember will be totally worth it.

9:00 p.m.: You start texting your friends, trying to figure out who’s up for the 24-hour rager you’re envisioning. “Sorry, I’m studying for exams next week :/” and “I don’t know… I’m pretty busy with work.” F@ck. After texting eight other people, you reach out to your freshman-year roommate that you talk to occasionally. They’re down.

10:00 p.m.: You find yourself at a dorm party. It seems like it might be a birthday, but you don’t know the host. Somehow, it was much more glorious when you were envisioning it a few hours ago. Kind of cramped and hot, when you think about it. At least the lecture hall had ventilation, you find yourself thinking. Wait. Why the f#ck are you comparing this party to your exam?

11:00 p.m.: After a few drinks and a new location, you’re finally starting to have a good time. The white-girl-decor swirls together. Kind of looks like a bunch of hexagons. Hexagons. Where have you seen those before… A chill runs down your spine. You start thinking about the cyclical carbon chains on your organic chemistry midterm. Snap out of it, you think to yourself. It’s over, you don’t have to worry anymore. You’re enjoying rum-and-coke out of a red solo cup, you’re the epitome of relaxation. But… is it over? Did the professor schedule another midterm within the last two days? Maybe you should just check Canvas to make sure. You barely resist. Your thumb twitches

12:00 p.m.: You notice the cute girl from section standing to the side. Intoxicated, you decide to shoot your shot. You walk up to her, ready to deliver your smoothest one liner. “What… how did you think the exam went?” you hear yourself slur. F#ck! Can you relate to people on any level besides academic?! Why did you think that would be a good opener?? This isn’t freshman year anymore, that shit doesn’t slide. “I think it was okay, haha,” she says. You’re too drunk to discern if it’s a genuine smile or not (spoiler: it’s not). She moves towards her friends.

1:00 a.m.: Normally, this is when your night would start, but after a week of surviving on three hours of sleep a night, you’re ready to turn in. You turn to say goodbye to your old roommate, but you lost them a few parties ago. Damn. You start the trek home.

11:00 a.m: You wake up, groggy, dry-mouthed, and with a headache. You haven’t felt this shitty in the last two weeks, you think happily. You try to keep your exam-paper-flashbacks at bay. Finally, the freedom to get f*cked up.

The BlogBabies were itching to get in on the Drunk/Sober/High action, and what’s more freshman than a Frosh Ball? Given that freshmen only roam in packs, we found it appropriate to expand the usual three person group by adding two new members, Crossfaded and another Drunk! We present the first ever Drunk/Drunk/Sober/High/Crossfaded.

Since no one ever shows up on time, we all agreed to meet at 10:00 p.m. to do our respective imbibing and/or smoking (or neither, poor Sober).

10:03 p.m. Cross has already taken 3 shots by the time the rest of the BlogBabies arrive. She has been feeling nauseous and hungover all day, so she did not eat dinner. Not her best decision.

10:05 p.m. High shows up already pretty high because he “comes prepared.” For additional preparation, as he tells us later, he watched “a shit load of Ru Paul’s Drag Race before [he] came.”

In a rare turn of events for D/S/H, Sober is the last to arrive… prepared with her journalistic integrity and iPhone for notes.

Very quickly, Cross and High decide they need to be high/higher, respectively, and so commences the search for an appropriate place to smoke. In response to the suggestion of the trash room, High notes that “It is where I belong.”

10:14 p.m. We’ve found a room willing to host us.

10:16 p.m. Cross is fairly drunk now that she’s about 6 shots in. She’s pleased with herself for being functional enough to prep her bong.

C: Aren’t you always amazed when you see drunk people roll just the nicest jays ever? Muscle memory, man!

H: It looks like an Erlenmeyer flask. Would you like to meet my bowl, Venus? Looks like the atmosphere of Venus.

10:32 p.m. Sober realizes that everyone is saying “Bojangles” for some unbeknownst reason and is once again realizing she is way too sober to deal with everyone.

Cross is staring at them while they go over the pronunciation of this weird word. She says nothing because she has NO idea what bojangles is. Is it the name of a famous clown like Bozo? A chain food place? A TV character?Continue Reading

Thanksgiving for a number of college students was a chance to have a bit of familial comfort and a respite from the Ratty/Vdub experiences to instead indulge in pumpkin pie, apple pie, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and everything autumnal and awesome. But of course, not everyone at Brown celebrated Thanksgiving or ate Thanksgiving food; BlogDailyHerald went straight to the source and asked a few international students to share their own favorite holiday foods. We posed a survey to the international community at Brown and here are some of the answers we got:

For those looking to mix up the obscene amount of chocolate eaten during the holiday season (hello, winter break ’15), José Soria ’19 of Madrid, Spain, has your alternative. Jose loves turrón, which he describes simply as “super Spanish.” Turrón is essentially a blank canvas for your sweet tooth dreams. Any variation of a block of egg whites, sugar, and honey is considered turrón, and add-ins typically include nuts and chocolate. (Side note: when I lived in Spain my host family had a basket of turrón on the table for three months surrounding Christmas and it was beautiful.)

For Ian Cheung ’16, of Hong Kong, his favorite holiday food is tang yuan, which is “composed of these little balls of glutinous rice filled with black sesame, in a kind of soup broth.” In addition to being delicious, tang yuan has sentimental value for Ian because “‘it’s a very non-Western sweet food that symbolizes family union,” and reminds him of visiting relatives and family gatherings in Taiwan when he was a kid. It also has the added bonus of being hilarious to eat, because according to Ian, tang yuan is super chewy and often leaves lots of black sesame seeds between your teeth.

If you’ve ever dreamed of having your photo circulate to millions of people on social media, this could be your chance (well, realistically, probably not, but still get excited). The Lecture Board has offered up Brandon Stanton as a candidate for Spring 2016, and this could be your chance to make it big. Stanton is the creator of Humans of New York, a blog that features photos of New Yorkers Stanton runs into on the streets, Started in 2010, the blog catapulted to success through the rise in social media use, and the HONY Facebook page now has over 16 million likes. In addition to running the uber popular blog, Stanton is the author of three books, one of which spent 45 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list.

“I’m trying really, really hard to be authentic. Sometimes I’m successful, but other times I overthink it and a lot of bullshit comes out.”

For those looking for an inspiration to follow a dream, Stanton is a classic example of someone who pursues their passion. Taking photos was not a viable source of income for a long time in New York, but he spent hours every day doing just that in an effort to share stories and connect New York. Stanton has become a type expert on interaction with strangers, with the ability to pull out intimate details of peoples’ lives in a comparatively short period of time. His ability to connect with strangers would create an interesting dialogue in a lecture setting, and Stanton could offer insight for finding commonalities among strangers within the Brown Community. Stanton has also closely interacted with Syrian refugees through a recent trip to Greece, Hungary, Croatia, and Austria. Given the current refugee crisis, Stanton might speak about the situation and offer insight on what it is like for Syrians to have to flee their country, often losing loved ones along the way.

“My husband and I sold everything we had to afford the journey. We worked 15 hours a day in Turkey until we had enough…